What is the difference between Bach and Handel?

What is the difference between Bach and Handel?

A general comparison of Bach’s with Handel’s music can be summarized as intensive melodies vs extensive melodies. Handel excels in broad and majestic motives while Bach’s melodies are intensive. Bach uses very dense contrapuntal texture with complex and chromatic harmonies.

Is Handel better than Bach?

Bach was the great master of the polyphonic form, a fugal genius and Handel a melodist of immense power and sensitivity. The sacred output from Bach greatly outweighs that of Handel although he composed only one full Mass in B minor.

Did Handel and Bach go blind?

The beautiful strains of George Frideric Handel’s “Messiah” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio” evoke a very different picture from the dark bond the two composers shared: Each was blinded by botched eye surgery at the hands of a flamboyant quack.

What is common between Bach and Handel?

George Frideric Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach, the towering musical giants of the Baroque, were both coincidently born in Germany about a month apart, in 1685. They also shared the musical style distinctive of the high Baroque characterized by the masterful use of counterpoint and fugal composition.

What are the similarities and differences between Bach and Handel?

Bach mostly spent his life in German, while Handel traveled to Europe learning music in Italy and later settled down in England. Bach composed more instrumental music and composed almost in all music style except opera , while Handel composed a lot of Cantata of chorus which he was famous for.

Did Bach write the Messiah?

“There is so much fine Easter music — Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, most especially — and so little great sacral music written for Christmas,” he said. Handel wrote the original version of Messiah in three to four weeks. Most historic accounts estimate the composer spent only 24 days writing the oratorio.

What is the musical style of Handel?

Handel’s Musical Style Handel’s operatic style is centred on the da capo aria, an A–B–A structure which, in the reprise of the A section, allowed the vocalist to present an improvised ornamented version of Handel’s melodic line designed to show off the singer’s gifts.

Are any of Bach’s descendants alive today?

Bach has no known descendants living today. His great-granddaughter, Frau Carolina Augusta Wilhelmine Ritter, who died 13 May 1871, was his last known descendant. [1] (The article from which this was taken was written in 1930.